Singing. Scribing. Sonnets.

Singing one’s heart out

It has been a while since my last update, and while I don’t have much new fiction news (I’m working on a couple of short stories with an eye towards a to-be-announced anthology and hope to have the book o’ sonnets out this summer), I do have some nifty things to share from all of the singing I’ve been doing lately, and there has been a quite a bit of that.

I’ve had the pleasure of singing with the chamber choir SACRA/PROFANA since December, which has involved some of the most difficult and rewarding music I’ve sung in my life, particularly our February Black History Month concerts on which we sang Anthony Davis’s “Voyage Through Death to Life Upon These Shores,” a shatteringly brilliant setting of Robert Hayden’s poem “Middle Passage.”

Check out this video of first movement, though please note that the text includes disturbing and graphic language and descriptions of human slavery:

And on the other end of the choral music spectrum, we recorded a couple of brand new indie electro-pop tracks, “Play” and “Who Can Say” with composer Stephen Feigenbaum, which have been released under the collective name Doctrine. TIME magazine recommended “Play” in a feature called “5 songs you need to listen to this week,” so that was awesome, as was performing them live at venues in San Diego and Los Angeles.

So that’s a little bit of what I’ve been up to!

I suppose this is my way of sort-of-apologizing for not having as much writing to share lately, but I’m sad to say that being busy with singing isn’t the only thing that’s kept me from making more writing progress, particularly with the book o’ sonnets. I’ve also been dealing with the sudden loss of our scruffy pup Giovanni to cancer a couple of weeks before what would have been his 7th birthday. Regular readers of this space know that many of the sonnets I wrote for the daily project were about Gio, so revisiting those works has been painful, if also lovely remembrances. Thankfully, Gio was survived by his sister Hildegard the Überdachshund, who keeps us walking and laughing, but we miss our lil’ scruff butt every day. Here he is at Ocean Beach Dog Beach last June demonstrating his Thousand Mile Stare.

Love always, little buddy.

Thankfully, I will be attending a writer’s retreat in July (my first in three years!), and I’m hoping that the week will do a bit of soul-nourishing as well as give me some badly-needed time devoted solely to creative writing pursuits. I look forward to having more writing to share in the very near future.